Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce Act Without, the first solo exhibition of Israeli artist Ariel Schlesinger at the Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris.

The exhibition starts on the 5th of April and will last until the 5th of May.

Ariel Schlesinger (born in Jerusalem, lives in Berlin and New York ) looks at our reality in a poetic way, deflecting everyday objects in some discrete subversion. With humor and in an offhand manner, he achieves to insufflate life to those objects, turning them away from their original purpose, shifting them through subtle transformations.

His work creates a tension between the materiality of ordinary and used objects and their original purpose. He thus unveils the hidden potential of details we usually pay no attention to. His objects, often carrying somewhat of a trivial sense of reality, are getting to coexist and are sometimes played in poetic situations, where the distanced view of the art piece gives way to a feeling of menace, without any rationality. Some of his installations and sculptures show off some objects weassume are innocent, which in their situation and their association of potentially dangerous objects (gas bottle, broken glass pieces, flames…) unforeseeably provoke a strong emotional impact. The artist undeniably uses surprise, as well as the fascination people hold on fire, the explosions, as if the point was to highlight our deepest fears, our helplessness facing danger.

In his installation Braunschweig door, presented at the Yvon Lambert gallery, the viewer is confronted to a flame, shooting up from a door. Schlesinger uses emotional mechanisms again, where the reminder of a certain situation in which normality shifts to chaos takes a different dimension for every person. He shows the idea that normality; our everyday life can simply turn to a disaster in an instant. The catastrophe seems possible, conceivable, and yet no anxiety comes through.

Devoted to the construction of machines and low-tech mechanisms, the artist seems to be closer to DIY than to impeccable machinery. With his piece Act Without, an inexistent poetry seems to emerge through the simplicity of the mechanism. In a curious three-act choreography, the two chairs from which the work is made move due to a discrete motorization. A very human aspect bursts from this irregularity, from the harshness of these imperfect models that fall endlessly.

Also visible in the exhibition I believe in a two states solution, a little table sprinkled in pens and pencils, like abandoned in the middle of some unfinished work. By looking more closely, one can observe that one of the pencils is actually sculpted in an incense stick and is consuming slowly in the exhibition space. The title I believe in a two states solution speaks of the physical reality of the object but lets also betray a political evocation.

This exhibition from Ariel Schlesinger is an exhibition where without being ever visible the body still is everywhere, from a physical, political, poetic or social point of view.